150 Years of Patent Office Practice

This article examines the administrative practices of the patentoffices in 60 countries over a 150-year period, a little exploredarena where government bodies and private firms interact. Largerand wealthier countries where international trade is more importantgive patent applicants more options. In these nations, patentoffice administrators’ flexibility is often restrictedand the responsibility for determining patentability dividedbetween the patent office and the courts. Civil law nationstend to rely solely on the courts to determine patent validityand restrict the discretion of patent office administrators.They also tend to offer patent applicants more options.     

The nature of forensic science opinion--a possible framework to guide thinking and practice in investigations and in court proceedings.

The questions that are asked of forensic scientists during the course of a criminal investigation, and during subsequent court proceedings, are of varied form. This paper attempts to place these questions into broad generic types and explores the difference in the inferential process that a scientist may employ when forming opinions that help answer these questions. From this model, a working definition of different roles and attributes for forensic scientists is described which may offer greater clarity for both practitioners and users of forensic science.     

The Philadelphia predictive policing experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This place-based, randomized experiment explored the impact of different patrol strategies on violent and property crime in microscale predicted crime areas....     

UK Labour and the EU Single Market: ‘Social Europe’ or ‘Capitalist Club’?

This article looks at the UK Labour Party’s view of the EU single market over the last four decades, focussing on three case study periods when this issue was particularly salient: first, the time of the single market’s introduction under Neil Kinnock’s leadership; second, the A8 accession with Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister; and third, between the 2016 European referendum and 2019 general election during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader. This historical narrative uses the theoretical approach of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik—of a ‘trilemma’ faced by national policy makers in response to globalisation—as a lens to describe a clear arc in Labour’s policy towards the single market across the three case studies. A position of initial scepticism moved to support under Kinnock’s leadership, and then active encouragement under Blair, before coming back again under Corbyn to uncomfortable non-commitment. This arc directly correlates with the ebb and flow of the party’s overall economic approach—first the Keynesian, national Alternative Economic Strategy at the time of the party’s 1983 general election defeat; then, the deviation under Blair to a policy that actively encouraged cross-border market liberalisation; and finally the return to an Alternative Economic Strategy-style approach under Corbyn.     

Common Wealth

After reviewing developments in human rights law and international law – in particular the domestication of international human rights law and the rise of the democratic norm in international law – the importance of these developments for the Commonwealth and for its member states is highlighted and linked to many of the programmes and policies that the Commonwealth Secretariat has recently launched. This paper discusses these developments and others in order to stress the wealth of potential advantages for Commonwealth member states and their citizens that flow from a common commitment under the rule of law to human rights and democracy. The authors endeavour to show that such wealth is more than mere economic benefit – as important as that undoubtedly is – and that citizens stand to reap a moral system of government, one which expands the opportunities for popular participation in political processes and puts an end to social practices that marginalise some citizens and empower others.     

Bridging the ‘macro’-‘micro’ divide in policy-oriented research

There is a recognised tension between the development practitioner's need for timely intelligence on key topics, and the normal routines of academic development studies. Closing that gap involves, among other things, elaborating new ways of organising and doing research. This article, by an academic, is concerned especially with how to combine interactive rapid-appraisal methods with inputs from more conventional styles of research in ways that bridge the 'macro'-'micro' divide and shed light on national policy trends by exploring community and household responses. It describes two pieces of team research carried out in Tanzania and Zambia at the instigation of the Swedish official agency, SIDA.     

Explaining Capitalism: The Method of Marx's Political Economy

The central thesis of this article is that Marx's explanation of the significant phenomena of the capitalist economy draws upon a basic theoretical syntax of a determinist/latent functionalist type. This conclusion has three consequences. First, it extends the range of functionalist explanation in Marx beyond its traditional loci, namely the theory of history and the analysis of the role of the state and other institutions in stabilizing capitalism, into the very heart of Marx's project, his political economy. Secondly, it has a powerful, though indirect, impact on our understanding of what might loosely be called the normative component of Marx's writings in as much as it identifies a specific sort of unfreedom peculiar to capitalist society. Thirdly, it shows just how great a challenge is mounted against Marx's project by those who seek to recast its method of explanation along methodological individualist lines. For if the first two points are accurate, rational-choice Marxists are drawn into a critique of both the explanatory and normative core of Marxism.